Re: I18n comment: period or full stop

On Tuesday 2006-01-24 19:34 +0000, Ian Hickson wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 21 Jan 2006 ishida@w3.org wrote:
> > 
> > Comment: You use the name "period" for the character U+002E, which is 
> > the Unicode 1.0 name for "full stop". You might change the naming or 
> > make the reference to the Unicode version for this naming explicit.
> 
> This is an official comment on behalf of the CSS working group.
> 
> I've made this change:
> 
> -<p>Working with HTML, authors may use the period (U+002E,
> -<code>.</code>) notation as an alternative to the <code>~=</code>
> +<p>Working with HTML, authors may use the "full stop" notation
> +(U+002E, <code>.</code>) as an alternative to the <code>~=</code>
>  notation when representing the <code>class</code> attribute. Thus, for
>  HTML, <code>div.value</code> and <code>div[class~=value]</code> have
>  the same meaning. The attribute value must immediately follow the
> -&quot;period&quot; (<code>.</code>).</p>
> +&quot;full stop&quot; (<code>.</code>).</p>
> 
> Please let us know if this does not satisfy your request.

I'm actually opposed to this change.  If the official language of W3C
specs is US English, it should remain "period".  I suspect many, if not
most, US readers are unfamiliar with the term "full stop" as referring
to a punctuation mark.  (I do distinctly remember being puzzled when
reading a text [1] that referred to "full stop" and (I think) "pause" as
marks of punctuation and eventually figuring out that it was referring
to what I called "period" and "comma".  I suspect that memory is from
when I was in high school, or perhaps even college.)  I'm not sure what
percentage of UK readers are familiar with the term period, though.

-David

[1] It may have been H. W. Fowler's The King's English.

-- 
L. David Baron                                <URL: http://dbaron.org/ >
           Technical Lead, Layout & CSS, Mozilla Corporation